About the ArcGIS Server Developer Help system
Welcome to the developer help system for ArcGIS Server for the Microsoft .NET Framework. ArcGIS Server offers a complete and integrated, server-based geographic information system (GIS) with out-of-the-box, end user applications and services for spatial data management, visualization (mapping) and spatial analysis. ArcGIS Server provides an "author, serve, use" model that involves authoring content in ArcGIS Desktop, serving content from ArcGIS Server, and using (or consuming) content through open standard interfaces by a variety of clients, both ESRI and non-ESRI. This help system provides information about administering services and developing applications with ArcGIS Server for Microsoft .NET.
As a developer, building and configuring GIS information to be hosted in an ArcGIS Server service is an important step in providing an efficient and comprehensive solution. As a result, ArcGIS Server administration topics are included in this developer help system. The Roadmap for administrators topic provides links to a comprehensive set of ArcGIS Server administration topics. In general, two applications are designed to administer ArcGIS Server—ArcGIS Desktop (ArcCatalog/ArcMap) and ArcGIS Server Manager. ArcGIS Server Manager is included with the ArcGIS Server product installation; therefore, the administration help topics in this help system discuss techniques for managing and serving content with ArcGIS Server using ArcGIS Server Manager. The following illustration provides an overview of the service capabilities and clients in an ArcGIS Server system.
As a developer, building and configuring GIS information to be hosted in an ArcGIS Server service is an important step in providing an efficient and comprehensive solution. As a result, ArcGIS Server administration topics are included in this developer help system. The Roadmap for administrators topic provides links to a comprehensive set of ArcGIS Server administration topics. In general, two applications are designed to administer ArcGIS Server—ArcGIS Desktop (ArcCatalog/ArcMap) and ArcGIS Server Manager. ArcGIS Server Manager is included with the ArcGIS Server product installation; therefore, the administration help topics in this help system discuss techniques for managing and serving content with ArcGIS Server using ArcGIS Server Manager. The following illustration provides an overview of the service capabilities and clients in an ArcGIS Server system.
As an ArcGIS Server developer, the Roadmap for developers topic provides an overview of developer content in the ArcGIS Server Help system. ESRI provides a number of prepackaged client applications and developer frameworks and APIs to consume ArcGIS Server services such as ArcGIS Desktop, rich Internet applications such as the ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight/WPF, and Web Mapping applications such as the Web Application Developer Framework (ADF) for Microsoft .NET.
In addition, ArcGIS Server provides a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) built on standards that allow virtually any client application to interact with and use the mapping, spatial analysis, and data management service of ArcGIS Server. These APIs include the following:
- Full-featured proprietary Component Object Model (COM)-based ArcObjects API
- A well defined SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) API based on Web standards
- A simple yet effective REST (Representational State Transfer) API based on common Web formats.